My mother looked up at me with tears in her eyes and said “you’re better than that”. I rubbed her back for forty minutes and told her I wouldn’t do it even though I would. She moved her wailing from the toilet to the couch and told me a part of her just broke. She wailed for hours and the house felt so empty with her wailing and I could even hear her scream for a second and I remembered that I’m just her child and she’s just my mother and I’m her baby and she told me this.
It was on a Tuesday morning when my cousin called me a slut. He was lying on the floor watching Apocalypse Now and eating orange slices from a blue plate and a cigarette was burning in a Ben-10 themed ashtray. I had on my white pumps and a pair of denim shorts and a pink baby-tee from Disneyland when I kissed my cousin on the head and he called me a slut.
All my diagnoses are some kind of perfectionism. That’s probably why I can only write with my lamp on and a view that doesn’t move.
This guy I met lives in a mansion where everything is white. The high ceilings and the marble staircase and the large Christmas tree that looks like it belongs in Gimbels. He lives with his parents but his parents are away. He’s stocky and wears a gold chain and a Ramon from Happy Feet haircut. He’s warm and tan and has a really hard dick. So hard it touches his stomach. We talk on his bed while Game of Thrones plays on his flat-screen and he tells me he doesn’t think Sophie Turner is pretty. He has a Chesterfield sofa in his room and we fuck on it. He comes quickly and I look down at him and the condom is loaded and he swears and I swear I can feel some in me. We fuck for less than five minutes and we talk for fifty. He asks me if I want to be his girlfriend. I can take you out for a coffee, he says. I can be the guy who drives you around, he says. He tries to guess my name. His first guess is Scarlet. That’s what I want to call my daughter, I say.
She looked pretty with the glow of Cinderella on her face. We were watching the same Ipad and lying on the same blue pillow wearing the same Homer Simpson satin shorts and passing the same strawberry lollipop between us like a joint and I could taste her saliva with my own and it tasted like candy rolled in ashes from all the tobacco we smoked that day. She sat up and frowned and said her stomach hurt. It’s from all that fucking fairy floss, she groaned. She looked at me and I said nothing but looked at her sticky pouted lips and wanted to punch her.
Do you have any ambien?
No.
Ibuprofen?
No.
Coke?
No.
What do you have?
Weed.
So, no Coke?
No.
Fuck.
Sorry.
You know that if I do weed I’ll go brain dead again.
Her excuse for everything was that she had already been brain dead for three years from an eating disorder. I told her she should eat something and turned over to sleep. As I heard the Fairy Godmother say "Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo”, I remembered to check whether the Hello Kitty tin of coke was still in my bag in the morning.